What does Broadsight have in common with the US President's Office

Drupal developers are abuzz with the realization that the White House's new Recovery.gov site was built using the free and open-source content management platform Drupal. Pre-Recovery.gov, the perhaps highest-profile use of Drupal had been the Onion website. But that's not the only reason that Drupal fans are excited. I asked two CMS expert friends to help me understand the situation, and here are a few of the reasons they gave for why the White House's embrace of Drupal is momentous:

First off is the very fact that with the move the White House is offering an alternative to DC's long love-fest with proprietary technology. Drupal is free, and hey, the economy being what it is, there are tax-payer dollars to be saved on going open source.

Second, it shows that the White House isn't putting much stock in the argument that collaboratively-built software isn't stable or secure enough for government use. (Though one could make the argument that Recovery.gov isn't exactly mission critical.)

Third, Drupal is, arguably, progressive. It has relatively deep roots in Democratic politics, first getting attention in the political space as the foundation under Dean Space. Whatever state Drupal is in today is a result of the community of developers who cared enough to nurture it -- the underlying message, of which, of course, echoes Obama's political narrative. ([UPDATE] David Cohn's written a history of Drupal's political past.)